Mobilman, great to have the input from a person who has worked at a refinery. The Joliet Exxon refinery is not far from where I live so I will drive by and take a look. Thank you.
Ted
I have another question. I have been goggling images of the 31000 gallon tankcars as well as unloading facilities. Do the tankcars with crude oil unload through a valve in the bottom of the car?
Heavy oils - be it petroleum or vegetable - will use tank cars with steam coils inside. At the unloading dock, a steam line will be hooked to the tank car and the steam (within the pipes inside the car) will heat up the crude, and allow it to flow much more easily out of the bottom of the tank car.
These days heavy oils may be pumped out of the top of the cars, but I don’t have first hand knowledge of that.
There are a hundred or more types of crude oil, some fairly thin in consistency (best refining results) and some thick like “glue”.
Can the same tank car be used interchangeably for both purposes - - petroleum and vegetable - - by cleaning out the former contents? Or once used for one purpose, is the tank car forever destined to carry one type of product or the other?
Rich
NO, absolutely not.
I worked for three edible oil refineries. Vegetable oil tank cars were dedicated, and were steam cleaned inside after use (yes, a person went inside the cars to wash them out). This allowed the cars to go from say soybean to coconut oil to corn oil, etc.
Petroleum tankcars were also dedicated insofar as crudes, gasolines, fuel oils, and other. Crude cars were typically used only for crude, but the product cars could be interchanged with other petroleum based goods (after a thorough cleaning).
That said, in no case would petroleum tankcars be used for edible oils - or vice versa.
Thanks for that info.
Rich
Mobilman44,
A very good friend of mine got killed in an explosion at the Union 76 refinery near Joliet, IL. In the early 80’s. He was a pipe fitter and a very tall likeable guy…James Bruno…RIP.
Take Care! [:D]
Frank
Frank, sorry to hear about that. Petroleum refineries are very dangerous places to work. Safe guards by the company, industry, OSHA are there, but the fact remains the business deals with highly volatile and dangerous substances.
Yes, the “oil bizzness” pays big bucks, but they are earned.
Frank, RIP to your friend and the other oil refinery workers who perished that day long ago.
Having spent 30 years working as a company mechanic at a large oil refinery I can attest to the high level of danger involved. Lots of horror stories. But during my time working there that began in the late 70s I saw big leaps forward in safety and pollution emissions.
More on topic must say that I was the only one in the crew who didn’t mind getting held up at the R/R crossing on the way back to the barn. Ah, squealing flanges & the loud revving up and belching exhaust of the EMD switcher as it struggled to pull a string of loaded tank cars up from the LPG loading racks.
Regards, Peter
Thanks, Mobilman and Peter,
That was a sad day for sure…I was out of town at the time and could not make the wake. I was told it was a closed casket, with His picture on the top. We hung around together since high school, but that was in the late 50’s.
Take Care! [:D]
Frank
[quote user=“Lone Wolf and Santa Fe”]
mobilman44
Yikes, a thread about a refinery and I am only now responding!!!
I’ve worked at a number of refineries, most notably the Mobil (now ExxonMobil) refinery in Joliet Illinois and Beaumont Texas. The Joliet refinery was the first grass roots one built in many decades, starting up in June, 1973. Unlike most others, it was built with expansion in mind…and thus became a model for what refineries could be.
OK, a typical refinery brings in Crude oil via pipeline, barge, and the smaller refineries will also bring it in via tank car or tank truck. We are talking a lot of oil, for a decent sized refinery can process 300,000 barrels a day - a barrel being 42 gallons.
The biggest tanks are for crude storage and have fixed roofs. The gasolines (multi grades plus aviation gas) are normally stored in floating roof tanks. Diesel fuel and heating fuel are stored in solid roof tanks. By products of butanes and ethane are a gaseous state and stored in ball tanks. Petroleum coke (nasty stuff) is stored in open pits.
The crude oil is run thru various “units” to break it down into the components. The towers that you see catch the heated/evaporated crude components at the different levels. Simply put, the crude oil “fumes” will condense the heavier oils lower in the distilling units, the gasolines higher up, and the ethane/butanes at the top. From there the components are pumped to other units where the gasolines get octane boosted, finer cuts made of the different grades, etc.
Even a medium sized refinery is a huge complex. One might put some tankage and units on the edge of their layout and have a backdrop showing the “rest” of the refinery. Otherwise, a good representation of a refinery